Defining Difference
By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project
Societies have always been stratified. How those social layers are defined varies from nation to nation, era to era, and crisis to crisis. Wealth is normally given first place when deciding one’s stratum sociologically but there is more nuance than counting one’s cash on hand. Wealth gained by luck, pluck, grit, wit, or inheritance varies from a momentary flash of luxury to generational wealth. More often than not, one’s education and training are the better distinction between a lottery winner blowing through five lifetimes of money in a year and a frugal family that spends nothing unless it offers measurable benefits decades in the future.Education, at least how many view it today, is a relatively new part of societal stratification but not because children were uneducated in prior centuries. For most of human history, even when examining the elite, education typically prepared a child to continue doing what his or her family had always done. A farmer’s child was readied for the family business well before size and strength allowed. Roman senators trained their sons to be Roman senators. Bakers brought up bakers.
Formal public schools were not trialed until around 150 years ago. They became compulsory only a century ago but only for the elementary years for basic literacy since older children went to master whatever industry parents pursued. Only in the last 50 years have we viewed education as a compulsory conveyor belt from pre-kindergarten through high school, and in the last 20 years, through college even for students who had little interest in a four-year degree.
For the last 50 to 75 years, one could make pretty good assumptions about the economic trajectory of an individual based on the length and intensity of her education with some assurances that the more years spent in an institution gathering credentials, the better one’s financial outcome. This package was sold to several generations of students who bought it and paid for it only to discover that enjoyable careers are as limited as affordable houses made less so for those with massive student loans.
Education is Changing Once Again
There is another major evolution in education already in motion. There is no stopping this next change and so it is impossible to predict how education will look in three years. Today’s “normal” is gone. A far smaller than usual cohort of college freshman starting classes next year will find their chosen field has been either subsumed or wholly transformed by AI well before a diploma is in hand. What will define education over the next few years?
I have many thoughts on this answer as an educator, but I offer the top item on my list and only briefly today. AI is going to change everything but not for the better.
The Use or Abuse of AI in Education
Various tech development groups have already rolled out the first generation of personalized education apps and promote them as the ultimate opportunity for student development. Each student’s education will be “completely personalized” through an AI app namely in that each student will work at his own pace and advance at her own skill level. All of this will be done at the fraction of the cost of putting a human before the children each weekday. Sounds great.
As the new primary educator, AI will “get to know” the student and then tailor its responses to the child, mimicking a human teacher as closely as its creators allow while employing the most effective psychological enticements. Whole schools have fully or partially inaugurated this approach already. In a year or maybe two, AI will be standard, especially in depressed areas. “Teachers” in brick-and-mortar schools will not so much teach as patrol to ensure their students maintain engagement with a device all day.
Clever and competent critics forecast multiple issues by handing our next generation over to AI. Entrusting students to a device for twelve years is the stuff of nightmares. Most who attended a brick-and-mortar institution (K-college) between 2020-2023 have suffered educational gaps that will continue to change the nature of education even if AI were not here. Very few people prospered in an education exclusively through a device. Humans aren’t meant to.
My suspicion of AI in education sounds odd coming from a person who educates online. Lukeion Project core values have always valued human interaction, the ability to ask questions, give answers, converse respectfully, debate productively, and gain feedback from human instructors. It isn’t perfect but we have done our best to offer the humanities through human educators. We are daily bombarded with offers to become fully automated through AI learning tools making all our students fully self-paced. All topics become just a check list to rush through with a few well-worded multiple-choice questions! Forget grappling with the plight of the Trojan women in Greek Tragedy, disregard reading Shakespeare with your peers, never mind the sounds of Latin and Greek by her best poets, Ignore the power of history, philosophy, logic, and rhetoric. AI will keep you busy all day. You’ll hardly notice life slipping by.
An AI tutor will deliver a homogenized pulp of thoughts and subjects with no parental input nor ethical complexity, neither variations for local, political, social, traditional, nor religious preferences. For what dismal future does AI hope to shape a young mind this way?
My email inbox is loaded with AI vendors screaming students must start early so they are ready to use AI in the future! Absurd. They don’t need 12 years of preparation. Children entering middle school now are AI natives already with the smallest range of experiences. Dinner table debates are already being resolved by AI responses as the gold standard of truth to settle all. Public service campaigns are already here to remind people to be wary of AI images and recordings that are good enough to fool grandpa. AI is here now already, and this generation takes to it fish to water.
Heavy AI use has already shown grave issues educationally, ethically, socially, and most seriously concerning mental health. Societies across the globe push on. Many educational institutions say students are “going to do it anyway” so why not abandon reading, writing, and arithmetic but be sure to polish one’s AI query skills from an early age!
Higher education way already be doomed today, and all formal education will follow tomorrow. If people are keen to abandon the basics now--even before AI is universal in education--what will it look like in a couple of years?
This blog hasn’t offered too many encouraging words. A few imagine I’m taking too dark a view of this innovative new tool while some nod in agreement. AI will have many uses but serving as a student’s primary educator should not be one of them. Unfortunately, AI will be used primarily on the poorest students and will very quickly become the defining difference.